Before coming to Yale, she was a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University. Valdivieso is a former fellow of the John Carter Brown Library, a member of the Institute of Andean Studies, and a junior fellow in the Rare Book School’s Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography.
Her research focuses on the overlap between classical education and colonialism in the early Americas. Valdivieso’s current book project examines four Latin epics from colonial Mexico and Brazil as a case study for the relation between the reading and writing of Virgilian epic, on the one hand, and the development of soft power, on the other. She has published on the early works of the Inca Garcilaso, a poetic textbook printed in seventeenth-century Mexico, and the Miccinelli documents. Valdivieso is particularly interested in how classical literature shaped early depictions of indigenous Americans.
She is a cofounder of Hesperides, a scholarly organization which promotes the study of classical reception in the Luso-Hispanic world.
Interview with Erika Valdivieso in the Princeton Department of Classics Newsletter 2021 (pp. 10-11)